Xavier le Roy will perform his Le Sacre du Printemps solo show this weekend at the National Experimental Theater in Taipei as part of the “Innovation Series.”

Photo Courtesy of Xavier le Roy

The inspiration for the piece came from Le Roy’s watching the Berlin Philharmonic rehearse Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 2003. It raised several questions for him.

Do conductors, through their hand and arm gestures and body movements, lead an orchestra or is it the music leading the conductor? Are there differences in the way music is perceived by a conductor, the musicians and the audience?

Le Roy was also interested in the silence — the moment before a sound, before a conductor’s movement.

He began to analyze a conductor’s movements as if they were choreography and, in 2007, he premiered his own work, using Stravinsky’s title and a recording of the Berliner Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, with the sound design for the program by Peter Boehm.